Greetings! This blog is designed to lay out some of my hopes and aspirations for the design of Plenty Pact.
I recently made my first post about a week in the life of a co-op developer (specifically, this very week [May 25, 2020]!) to my patrons. Become a patron today and enjoy exclusive content and conversation with me, including inside views into my work with the Plenty Pact.
The Plenty Pact emerged from a zeitgeist: a time and a spirit. That is, specific conditions, negative and positive, as well as the clarifying force of Intuition, allowed for Plenty Pact to come into being in its current form.
Plenty Pact is an experiment into community supported development services. Kind of like community supported agriculture—what if we collectivized the cost and risk to afford unrestricted cooperative and leadership development services to our communities?
To my knowledge, it’s never been done before. It’s a bold experiment. But what better time to lean into innovation that could lead us to new worlds, better futures? As one of my spiritual teachers Kritee Kanko says about this dire, urgent moment of impending climate and civilizational catastrophe, “if now is not the time to innovate, I don’t know when is.”
Here are some of the conditions that went into the emergence of Plenty Pact… blessed fruits borne of catastrophe.
The capitalist economy is mortally sick from its own disastrous design flaws. So, why should I put more stock into it now? If the whole system could fail tomorrow, next month, next year… why should I put my energy and faith there, when I could use it to build bridges to alternative, more liveable futures?
I won’t unpack all the failings of “late stage” antimarket neoliberal capitalism here… suffice it to say, it is a system bound to die (and indeed, beginning to die right now) under the weight of its own design flaws and excesses: greed, exploitation, domination, hyper-stratification of wealth, etc. This economic way has programmed our minds to not-see its uglinesses and overstate its successes. It has programmed us to reinforce itself, like a memetic virus. Its messages of charge more money! work smarter not harder! define your worth by money! are insidious, internalized… This is why it feels uncomfortable to defy them, even if we disagree with them consciously. Yet those aggressive dictates from the dying capitalist system that has sold out 99% of human life in the name of astronomical profits sound increasingly hollow at best, antisocial and sinister at worst.
Given an economic future so precarious, I am already compelled to relinquish attachment to outcome. Given such structural precarity, even “going bankrupt” isn’t a fear worth avoiding. All the shame attached to ideas of “going bankrupt” arise from a capitalist lens… and all the terror implied by “bankruptcy” actually illustrates the unacknowledged violent horrors of capitalist praxis: that BECAUSE capitalism has so undermined the other forms of capital available to you—natural capital, social capital, spiritual capital, etc.—that you literally might not be able to SURVIVE without access to money, i.e., financial capital.
I reject this corrupt framing of the world, ourselves, and our value wholeheartedly. It is NOT the best we can do. So, rather than focusing on threat of bankruptcy, I am looking at that possibility through a different lens: as “defaulting into priesthood.” That is: If you won’t let me serve our highest potentials through the economy, I will serve in ways outside of it. (See “exit strategies,” below.)
There is urgency to directly enact mutual aid, to enact gift-giving and being of service with whatever empowerments we currently have. In this precarious Covid-19 pandemic condition, precipitating climate change disaster and our loss of access to today’s levels of resources: whether or not we actually get by will come down to our direct community relationships. If you have access to financial privilege, your role now is to spread it around. If you have significant social capital, your role now is to communicate to everyone in your networks and help make connections between those with resources and those going without. If you have access to knowledge and skills, your role now is to offer it around in ways that build others’ capacities to thrive—help people help themselves grow a garden, educate their children, community organize, etc. Ultimately we will wake up one day to find that our true wealth was, and is, in relationship. (Perennially, we thrive as a community, or not at all.)
There is a necessity of relating to this collective ordeal as a transformation and initiation. It occurred to me that in my nine years of cooperative development consulting, in my approach to my business I was already operating from principles of gift economics and solidarity, but it was not explicit in my work. The Covid-19 pandemic which has thrown many households’ incomes into a tailspin presented an ideal opportunity to me to meet the present moment with “renewed vows” of my existing commitment, putting my purpose “foreground” in my work, as I reflected, rethought, revised, and redesigned what I am doing. (Perhaps the same kind of renewing revisionary process is available to you right now? Reach out if you’d like to process about this together.)
There is a necessity of honoring our ancestors by stepping into “elderhood” through avidly recirculating our gifts, thereby courageously modeling liveable pathways. (Read more about my mystic clarifying call that launched Plenty Pact here, and here.)
To be perfectly frank, when looking at my constant low-income condition across nine years of providing high-quality professional development services, I wondered to myself, could I do much worse? If I change nothing, I will continue to make very little money (less than a schoolteacher) each year. Maybe I won’t do worse… maybe I’ll do even better through a structurally generosity-based model.
Through the Plenty Pact, my schedule might be fuller, I might be working more, but that is not a problem. In fact, it’d be a good thing to be more connected with my community in these ways. In the context of a spiritual calling to be of service, working “more” is not a problem at all. Especially if the work itself energizes rather than depletes me.
Regarding the Plenty Pact experiment: what IS the worst thing that could happen?
WORST: As was addressed above, I could “go broke,” go bankrupt. Let’s unpack that…
If I were to go broke, that removes me from the community. It demonstrates that what I am offering is not perceived to be of value. It would imply that it is not time to build new cooperatives and new leaders at any cost, that cooperative economics don’t much matter to us. It would fracture (or even sever) trust and relationship, as I would be forced back into the money economy (and into a lower expression of myself) out of desperation. Or, it could force me out of the money economy entirely, and into the precarious “wilds.”
Therefore, Plenty Pact becomes an invitation to community to hold me, and I will hold them, in richer ways of relationship than ever before. Hence the transparency of what I’m doing. This naturally follows a model more akin a priest-ministry structure than to a transactional business arrangement.
And those “wilds” beyond capitalism could indeed be generative… I would seriously look at the option of forming a radical futurist church as an exit strategy of this experiment! (After all, radical relational praxis is leave as many generative doors open as possible!)
I suppose another “worst” outcome is if this model prevents me or others from showing up at our best to this work. So far, the work is already proving more meaningful to me and my clients, so I don’t suspect that will be the case. And thanks to Plenty Pact’s iterative and human-centered design, I believe such risks are mitigated: the model is highly inclined to evolve, to continuously get better at fulfilling its purpose. This makes the outcome of “degraded overall quality” of work and services diminishingly unlikely.
BEST: I would define success as being able to meet by modest human needs, even saving a little money. This would allow me to operate the Plenty Pact for as long as humanly possible, to provide services continuously and build nourishing long-term relationships with people and activist projects. To me, THAT is the utmost definition of true wealth!
If I were to earn even more than I needed, I intend to redistribute the surplus to other causes of human equity and empowerment embedded in my communities. (I am always interested in supporting BIPOC leadership, dismantling mass incarceration and police violence institutionally afflicting POC and immigrants, supporting food justice/food sovereignty for BIPOC people, reparations, etc.)
This would define success multiplied, amplified… a regenerative structure seeks those “win-win-win” scenarios!
And I’d define being wildly successful as others deciding to follow in my footsteps of the Plenty Pact. Imagine if another essential service provider in my network saw my success with Plenty Pact, and decided to convert their businesses to operating on the same or a similar model. (This would be especially important if I become completely booked up with clients, and need to make a lot more referrals out to others in my network!)
Imagine the success of Plenty Pact spiraling out so that a second and then a third service provider, with complementary skill sets, joined me “on purpose” and formed an alliance… now imagine it spirals out to a network of 10, 20 or even more service providers who all commit to delivering services on these terms, and whose skill sets represent a mix of the services small businesses, social enterprises, nonprofits and entrepreneurs need in order to thrive. Then we’d REALLY be maximizing impacts and benefits as we built collective wealth! I dream of such a values-aligned network forming and coordinating itself to best serve our communities, like a peak of synergy. Such a brilliant outcome must flow from fractal success of this model, however… that is, if the first iteration of Plenty Pact fails, its success cannot be replicated.
Already in just one week of launching Plenty Pact, I am loving about this work:
…the freedom to work with people “where they’re at”. True in multiple ways. For one, I get to co-create, through conversation, models for how my client can most deploy their capital (financial, creative, social, intellectual, spiritual, etc.) in the context of our collaboration, in ways that are most enlivening to them. This redefines the “value” of what my clients are putting out into the world—both what they’re creating, and what they’re offering—in profound ways.
…how this new model lets us “embrace emergence.” I can say with confidence to a client, “Let’s only set up the minimum viable structure for our working together that lets you reach that next big milestone. Then, we can change it up from there!” This maximizes flexibility and evolution in our process, taking things one “horizon” at a time, leaving space for unexpected things to happen and processing those with sensitivity and enthusiasm. This approach avoids overly predetermining a course of action (which can lead to bloat and irrelevant work/results, especially as so many things in the world today are undergoing big changes!).
…how we are allowed to “follow purpose and pursue meaning” in our work. My consulting and coaching approach involves centering what we are doing from what you say, from the meaning you are constructing from the process. That means our work always begins with my deep listening, nuanced inquiries, and responsive noticing—similar to how a counselor works. The goal is then to bring implementation (actions) into alignment with the authentic purpose, values, and truth in the system. To paraphrase Antonio Machado, “we make the path by walking it.” Through us, more meaningful forms of ourselves and how we serve our communities are wanting and asking to happen.
I also love that I get to express my values and principles so openly in this model. I’ve been thinking a lot this week about cooperative principles #7, “Concern for Community.” Although my business is comprised of just me at this time, I am nevertheless a cooperator, and I am doing my best to embody cooperative principles (particularly principle 7) in the design and implementation of Plenty Pact. (Maybe one day, if wildly successful, the Plenty Pact will grow to become a cooperative of multiple service providers!)
Quoting Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s recent article on cooperative development in prisons, “[C]ooperatives foster reciprocal and trust relationships that generate more efficient economic exchanges, values-based exchanges that prioritize community, and positive externalities, such as social benefits to members, their families, and communities. Co-ops are good neighbors and community assets. Moreover, cooperatives both successfully address the effects of crises and survive crises better than other types of enterprises.”
Yes. And: I hope all of these are also true for Plenty Pact—for how we serve co-ops to serve us.
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